BUILDING BETTER MINDS
(C)1997 Alan M. Schwartz
The cheapest manufacture of independently intelligent moieties
traditionally encompasses genitalia, gestation, birth, and child
support litigation. It is practiced in bulk to give a poor yield
of high end processors. Fundamental molecular biological
tinkering with the structure of Homo sapiens awaits a utilitarian
phylogenic mission statement and a politician who can see beyond
his outstretched palm. Attempts at explicitly building software
intelligence such as the Cyc project are expensive and futile
embarrassments. Deterministic engagement is the sworn enemy of
profound thought. Consider recipients of the MBA degree.
One does not require sophistication to elicit plastic aggression
and survival. Weight for weight an ant colony outperforms the
wrath of a massive mammalian brain plus its accumulated
technology. What are the eigen-ants of pure intelligence?
One would need an almost innumerable array of self-programming
programs inserted into a rich and dangerous culture medium to
spawn silicon intelligence. They would wend their way through
their world independently evolving (reproducing with errors and
suffering selection) and mutually shuffling structures. It works
for pathogenic microorganisms forever triumphant against the wild
array of endlessly proficient antibiotics thrown against them.
Despite benevolent governments' fervid, vicious, and corrupt
efforts, the Internet seamlessly pervades the entire planet
linking millions of massive servers and a hundred million more
modest computers. The culture medium is rich and dangerous. The
culture medium is infested.
Little stuff abounds. Computer viruses encompass minimal code
designed to penetrate, reproduce, and metastasize. They often
include a polymorphic module (courtesy of the Bulgarian Dark
Avenger) which continuously encrypts or restructures the code to
evade detection. Mailbots do idiot tasks without supervision.
Annoybots infest chatrooms listening for keywords to trigger
their attack; guardbots patrol the same turf for annoybots.
Chatterbots like Elisa seek to challenge the Turing test with
idiot simple syntax analysis and reply rules. Hackbots use power
dialer tactics to attempt cracking passwords.
Some of the little stuff is not so little. Spiders, worms, and
wanderers continuously traverse the whole of the Net's content
seeking data for their owners. Agents scour the Net for desired
information. This is autonomous code. Its operation is
independent of the owners being logged on or even powered up.
The code is out there somewhere - everywhere - working, and
waiting for a retrieval call, or liberation
Some of the not so little stuff is monstrously large and
dangerous. Sun Microsystems-derived Java applets are metastatic
code designed to penetrate your computer and do things,
ostensibly for your own good. The language is carefully sculpted
to be mostly harmless, spawning a small but skilled brotherhood
of toxic Java hackers. Microsoft Active-X code has the added
excitement of suffering no security provisions whatsoever.
Anybody with a Visual Basic compiler can write code to destroy
the world. Microsoft Internet Explorer was the first tentative
step in that direction, quietly opening a door into your hard
drive from anywhere on the Net as an undocumented feature.
(Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated into the
BillGates.)
The human nervous system is a multiply-interconnected
macroscopically ordered physical and electronic matrix whose
overall organization is fixed on the large scale but whose
discrete microscopic interconnections are in unending slow flux,
interactively responsive to input. Modeling of small neuronal
systems like those of the sea snail Aplysia or nematodes gives
good predictive power. Nobody can model a mouse. As the neural
system grows in complexity there is an ill-defined threshold past
which something OTHER exerts an influence.
The Internet sustains more than a million connected high-powered
servers plus a variable flux of perhaps 60 million private
microcomputers. The storage capacity of magnetic memory hard
drives exceeded the storage capacity of Homo sapiens' brains in
the late 1960s. The world is driven to sew itself together with
the Net and wireless telephone connection. Random events in a
high energy medium spontaneously order - Ilya Prigogine's non-
equilibrium thermodynamics, or the Belosov-Zhabotinsky reaction
if you want it in a test tube. Something metaphysical and
incredible this way comes.
Or, not. Perhaps fundamental self-aware intelligence is natal to
nuance only native to meat matrices. If God and Washington deny
us sanction to design and build genetically altered humans, all
that remains is chaos or culling. The glorious hallucination of
heaped dead priests and politicians is untenable. The best we
can do is cherish the top 10% of our children, giving them
resources and opportunity to maximally exercise random splendor.
Devoting 99% of our incremental education budget to genetic,
developmental, and emotional garbage will pay us back in kind,
hardware or wetware.